3Many studies on Sinclair have underlined her “attempts to merge Victorian realist traditions and the new techniques” of literary Modernism (Kunka and Troy 2016, 5), foregrounding Sinclair’s dialectical embrace of both repetition and renewal. This paper suggests that Mary’s close reading of Shelley and Byron’s poetry creates a little-known continuum between Romanticism and Modernism and that Sinclair’s novel incorporates selected distinctive landmarks from late Romanticism into her idiosyncratic experimentations with Modernist writing. In other words, this paper aims to study how Mary Olivier’s interest in Romanticism leads to Mary’s rebirth as a Modernist poet who “shiver[s] between certainty and uncertainty” (Sinclair 1982, 379), thereby forming an interesting counterpoint to the Modernist aesthetics of fragmentation and dialectical embrace of “neophilia” and “neophobia” Through an analysis of the ways Sinclair’s use of Romantic poems shapes her character’s neo-idealist Bildung, her connectedness to nature and her affective self-actualisation, I aim to show that Mary’s rebirth as a Modernist poet derives from her transposition of Vorticist and Imagist lexicon to a rural setting through Romantic intertexts.

“That’s the Risk you Take”: Neo-Idealist Doubt, Sceptical Praxis, and the Modernist “Demise of the Subject”

a metaphysical idealism in which true being derives from some transcendental origin exceeding time and space; and second, a metaphysics of subjectivism in which the human subject presents herself as a source and ground of all meaning and value in the world. (Jones 2021, 92)

7As a neo-idealist, Sinclair has a very idiosyncratic understanding of consciousness (Gillespie 1978; Philips 1993) and claims that “the world arises in consciousness, through consciousness, and is of that stuff, with no independent existence apart from it” (Sinclair 1922, 111). She distinguishes between primary consciousness (“sense perception,” or subjective immediate experience) and secondary consciousness, which includes “all reflection, judgment, inference, inductive and deductive reasoning, all intellectual processes of experiment and discovery, even such immediacy as the flash of scientific intuition. It is the play of thought round and about its object” (ibid., 113). Her third category, “ultimate consciousness” (ibid., 45) is “an Absolute consciousness. [Sinclair] identifies this Absolute with the universe. As she also identifies the Absolute with God, her system is a kind of pantheism” (Thomas 2019, 138). True to Sinclair’s neo-idealist system, this threefold model of consciousness articulates psychological and philosophical perspectives. Her dialogic and interdisciplinary interests are probably one of the most innovative dimensions of both her fiction and her nonfiction and testify to her intellectual freedom and independence. In her two dozen essays and in most of her novels and short stories, there is actually no clear-cut frontier between her psychology studies, her philosophical idealism, her interest in feminism and her questionings on mysticism. In her fiction, this threefold model of consciousness involves a dialectical embrace of both Modernist stream of consciousness and Romantic tropes that shows her taste for anachronistic montages that still participate in the “renewal of novelistic mimesis towards a psychological form of realism” (Brasme 2018, 2).

Supposing there isn’t anything in it? Supposing – Supposing –
Last night I began thinking about it again. I stripped my soul; I opened all the windows and let my ice-cold thoughts in on the poor thing; it stood shivering between certainty and uncertainty.
I tried to doubt away this ultimate passion, and it turned my doubt into its own exquisite sting, the very thrill of the adventure.
Supposing there’s nothing in it, nothing at all?
That’s the risk you take.
[…]
There isn’t any risk. This time it was clear, clear as the black pattern the sycamore makes on the sky. If it never came again I should remember. (Sinclair 1982, 378-379)

9The Absolute is first represented as a “risk you take” and then as an experience that is possibly gone and can only be remembered. Sinclair does not really explore what that risk is about. Here, it might refer to Mary’s isolation from Victorian society but Sinclair’s first neo-idealist essay also warns readers against the “inward” look of mysticism, which might induce dissociation, a pathology first studied by Pierre Janet (whose works she had read and quoted extensively in both her novels and her essays):

The mystic look is essentially an inward one. The mystic seeks God, for the most part, not in the outer world of art and science and action, but in the darkest and most secret recesses of his own soul. And it is precisely this darkness and secrecy that the psychoanalyst has the most reason to mistrust. [...] The mystic consciousness presents in a marked degree the pathological phenomena of “dissociation.” Monsieur Janet’s account of the matter leaves us no doubt. (Sinclair 1917, 258-259)

10Sinclair’s psychoanalytical essays, as we shall see in the following sections, suggest that sublimation is a means to avoid taking the risk of dissociative mysticism. This final emphasis on memory reasserts the primacy of consciousness in her belief system and directly echoes one of her major philosophical essays, The New Idealism (1922), in which she uses memory as an example that shows the relevance of her theoretical framework over realist philosophy (ibid., 47-48). That this scene fuses sensory, affective, and pantheistic dimensions clearly shows the originality of her approach that combines canonical idealism with her adaptation of the Modernist epiphany as a risky and doubtful feminine experience. As such, Mary’s Bildung perfectly illustrates the Modernist shift of focus, described by Victoria Gordon:

Freud’s theories work to show the subject as decentered, providing solid psychoanalytic framework for discussing the subject of the modernist Bildungsroman. This sense of self for the subjects in these novels frequently shifts and changes, demonstrating a difficulty in cultivating a complete and stable notion of “self.” These theories provide a critical vocabulary for explaining the alienation seen between subject and their sense of self and desire in the modernist Bildungsroman. Lacan and Freud show the subject as split between trying to sustain different aspects of a very contrived ‘reality’ for a sense of control, trying to fulfill the needs of their instincts, their own desire, and the desire of other [sic]. These various demands place pressure on the subject, and cannot be found in one simple solution, requiring the subject to continuously and unconsciously shift his focuses. (Gordon 2016, 16-17)

“While You Made Rhymes; While You Looked at the White Thorn-Trees”: Pantheism, Happiness, and Connectedness to Nature

Sinclair is of course not alone as an artist experimenting with representations of consciousness around this time […] but Sinclair’s fiction is full of hidden psychological spaces gesturing at barely discerned impulses. The unseen and unacknowledged influences of the “obscurer regions of psychology” (Divine Fire 103) on conscious themes are the prevailing themes of her “social problem” novels. (Jones 2021, 107)

13I argue that Sinclair’s anticipation of connectedness to nature via Romantic poetry belongs to the same attempt at representing these “hidden psychological spaces” that were informed by the psychoanalysis of her time or that provide insightful anticipation of later psychological research in developmental, social, and environmental psychology. The ontological and intimate connection with nature and Romantic poetry appears as a coping strategy that helps Mary get over the many obstacles set by her Victorian upbringing. For example, nature, as seen through the prism of Romantic poems, enables Mary to form affective and sensory bonds that contribute to the new definition of her identity, not as an obedient daughter but rather as an individual within nature, who needs to make sense of her subjective experience. Shelley’s questions about happiness in nature, in “To a Sky-Lark” – “What objects are the fountains / Of thy happy strain? / What fields, or waves, or mountains? / What shapes of sky or plain? / What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?” (Shelley 2002, 306) –, appear throughout the novel under different forms while systematically reminding readers of Sinclair’s neo-idealist theoretical framework and epistemic negotiation. Similarly, in the following extract, Mary, using the same lexis as Shelley, depicts nature as a source of questions and of happiness, while turning to poetry and nature to help her make sense of her recurrent nightmares about rising “dead people in the City of London Cemetery” (Sinclair 1982, 57):

Your happiness was now, in the moment that you lived, while you made rhymes; while you looked at the white thorn-trees; while the black-purple cloud passed over Karva.
[…] The hill world had never the same face for five minutes. Its very form changed as the roads turned. The swing of your stride put in play a vast, mysterious scene-shifting that disturbed the sky. Moving through it you stood still in the heart of an immense being that moved. Standing still you were moved, you were drawn nearer and nearer to its enclosing heart. (ibid., 311)

14The echoes with Shelley’s “The Cloud,” “To a Sky-Lark,” and “Ode to the West Wind” are numerous and so are features traditionally associated with Modernism, such as the second-person narrative, parataxis, the emphasis on mutability and ephemerality. In addition to the marked rhythm and the alliterations in [s] in the third sentence of the excerpt, one can note a combined reference to Shelley’s palette as a sign of Mary’s happiness, echoing both “the pale purple even” in “To a Sky-Lark” and “the depths of the purple sea” in “The Cloud” (Shelley 2002, 304 and 302). Shelley’s questions are echoed by Mary’s embrace of mystery and change, while the hint of a divine presence within nature (“an immense being that moved”) also derives from Shelley’s persona, who addresses the West Wind as “Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere” (Shelley 2002, 299), and adapts it to her pantheistic representation. In Shelley and Sinclair, there is a sense of re-enchantment, a term I borrow from Morris Berman who “maintains that the modern split between humanity and non-human nature has resulted from what he calls a ‘progressive disenchantment’ of the world […], and that as a result our sense of place in the world has been seriously undermined, if not eradicated” (quoted in Bryson 2017, 592). By contrast, Sinclair’s adaptation of Shelley’s interest in nature appears as an original illustration of Berman’s re-enchantment as it associates pantheism with a particular sense of happiness and positive affect. Indeed, beyond the resembling lexis and similar imagery in Sinclair and Shelley, the following comments, taken from Sinclair’s 1917 first idealist essay, A Defence of Idealism: Some Questions and Conclusions, clearly stresses the role of nature and poetry in Sinclairian peak experiences:

• 10 This expression can be read as a quote from Ezra Pound’s definition of an “image” in “A Few Don’ts (...)

Lovers and poets and painters and musicians and mystics and heroes know them: [...] moments when things that we have seen all our lives without truly seeing them, the flowers in the garden, the trees in the field [...] change to us in an instant of time,10 and show the secret and imperishable life they harbour; moments of danger that are sure and perfect happiness, because then the adorable Reality gives itself to our very sight and touch. (Sinclair 1917, 379, emphasis added)

15Like Shelley’s re-enchanting “happy strain” in “Ode to a Sky-Lark,” happiness is here a central term. In Sinclair’s essay, it refers to the individual experience of “ultimate consciousness” and shows how she jointly considers senses, sensations, and positive affect as evidence of the absolute. Her inclusion of natural elements as landmarks or indicators of an absolute epiphany point to her specific articulation of Romantic traditions with a Modernist aesthetics. One can indeed read Mary’s claims (“Standing still you were moved, you were drawn nearer and nearer to its enclosing heart” [Sinclair 1982, 311]) as a transposition of the Vorticist and Imagist lexicon to a rural setting through a pantheistic framework and a Romantic intertext. Mary’s neo-idealist rebirth as a fragmented, Vorticist self relies on an unprecedented, heterogeneous montage. That this fleeting re-enchanted experience happens to a young and isolated female character, who is described as “a dead child” (Sinclair 1982, 170) after her mother removes her from school, is also particularly innovative, adapting Romantic idealism and Neoplatonism to a feminine context. In Sinclair, not only is re-enchantment an absolute necessity but it also combines pantheism, feminine education, and poetic traditions. In other words, Sinclair draws from these traditions to develop a gendered Bildung that challenges previous narratives while focusing on the “unseen and unacknowledged influences of the ‘obscurer regions of psychology’” (Jones 2021, 107) that were to be explored in the following decades, including environmental psychology, place attachment and place identity.

“He Had the Soul of Shelley and the Mind of Spinoza and Immanuel Kant”: Romantic Politics and Modernist Affects

16In Sinclair’s novel, these numerous spiritual and aesthetic escapes into nature that metamorphose into an aesthetic act also further connect with Shelley’s poems on regeneration, which merge social and political aspects with personal emotions and growth. Indeed, whenever young Mary finds herself in a difficult situation, Shelley’s and Byron’s poems help her cope with these problems or overcome these challenges and contribute to her rebirth as a poet. But true to Sinclair’s neo-idealist concerns, Shelley himself becomes a direct source of happiness for Mary (as the name itself gradually fills with the mystical meaning we find in Sinclair’s essays). In the following extract, Mary turns to Shelley after having been jilted by her fiancé, Maurice:

She didn’t want him. But she wanted Somebody. Somebody. Somebody. He had left her with this ungovernable want.
Somebody. If you lay very still and shut your eyes he would come to you. You would see him. You knew what he was like. He had Jimmy’s body and Jimmy’s face, and Mark’s ways. He had the soul of Shelley and the mind of Spinoza and Immanuel Kant.
They talked to each other. Her reverie ran first into long, fascinating conversations […]. He could tell you whether you were right or wrong […].
“Die – If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek.” He wrote that. He wrote all Shelley’s poems except the bad ones. […] If by dying to-morrow, to-night, this minute, you could know what it was, you would be glad to die. Wouldn’t you? (Sinclair 1982, 361)

17This is a particularly rich passage that merges self-derision with a sense of longing. Shelley appears as an ideal soul, perhaps a soulmate – an interesting development in the representation of a female protagonist’s journey that might be read under the light of Sinclair’s engagement with first-wave feminism. That the novel depicts a rebirth of Romantic love and aspirations (and a revival of female desire) via poetry and intellectual or sentimental fantasy is indeed particularly noteworthy. In addition, Mary also experiences a first sense of rebellion (that comes from an aesthetic and mystical epiphany as the one Sinclair described in her philosophical essay) just after reading Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” which tells of revolution and changes:

Happiness, the happiness that came from writing poems; happiness that other people couldn’t have, that you couldn’t give to them; happiness that was no good to Mamma, no good to anybody but you, secret and selfish; that was your happiness. It was deadly sin.
She felt an immense, intolerable compassion for everybody who was unhappy. A litany of compassion went on inside her: For old Dr Kendal, rotting in his chair; for Miss Kendal; for all women labouring of child […].
Sunday after Sunday.
And she would work in the garden every morning, digging in leaf mould and carrying the big stones for the rockery […].
She tried to keep on.
Some people kept on all day, all their lives. Still, it was not you so much as the world that was wrong. It wasn't fair and right that Maggie’s sister should have cancer while you had nothing the matter with you. Or even that Maggie had to cook and scrub while you made poems.
Not fair and right. (Sinclair 1982, 234-235)

18The inner dialogue and the repetitive language fully convey the young adult’s quest and Bildung as an affective and social process. Poetry (and Shelley’s poetry in particular) is instrumental in Mary’s social awareness and becomes associated with Modernist individuation but also self-doubt. Thanks to Shelley and the other Romantic poets that she reads, Mary is able to articulate her powerful and conflictual feelings with her budding social consciousness. She is putting her dual individuation process (emotional and moral or political) into words and is slowly able to break free from habit and social conformity.

19Complementing Battersby’s, Thornton’s and de Bont’s works on Sinclair’s Bildungsroman as feminist reappropriation of spiritual philosophy, artistic Bildung, and language, I argue that her use of Romantic poems in a female’s Bildung also frames a new approach to the Modernist Bildungsroman formula. After every ordeal, new definitions of the heroine’s being arise out of the poetry and inscribe her own self within the Modernist framework described by Gordon after Woolf’s and Joyce’s novels. Showing the complicated Bildung of female characters engaging in a close dialogue with aesthetic traditions seems particularly noteworthy. It is even more striking as the novel portrays a young woman’s rebirth as an artist thanks to her close reading of Romantic poetry, as I demonstrate in the final section of this essay.

“That Came of Reading Too Much Byron”: Rebirth as a Creative Process

20Mary’s love of words stems from her love of Shelley and Byron. In particular, reading Byron seems to induce mental imagery made of sounds, rhythmic patterns, and perhaps even synaesthesia. Both poets do play a major role in the heroine’s rebirth as a poet:

Poems made of the white dust, of the wind in the green corn, of the five trees – they would be the most beautiful poems in the world.
Sometimes the images of these things would begin to move before her with persistence, as if they were going to make a pattern; she could hear a thin cling-clang, a moving white pattern of sound that, when she tried to catch it, broke up and flowed away. The image pattern and the sound pattern belonged to each other, but when she tried to bring them together they fell apart.
That came of reading too much Byron.
How was it that patterns of sound had power to haunt and excite you? (Sinclair 1982, 125)

21In addition to the wind and the colours in the first paragraph that are reminiscent of Shelley, the phrase “haunt and excite you” in the final question suggests that Mary’s poetry combines affective, sensual, and emotional dimensions that clearly do not fit in or perhaps go beyond the restricted frame of her environment. The independent materials, sounds and images, as well as the synesthetic combination, show writing as a liminal experience and a nearly delirious work-in-progress that somehow seems to anticipate Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading (1934). To say it differently, the passage enacts a particularly intense creative process that dives into nature and poetic traditions, but does not always succeed in its stated goals – yet never fails to raise more questions (thereby announcing the concluding chapters of the novel and their negotiations with the risks of mystical introspection). In addition, repression is never very far, as in the following scene, in which Mary explains to Maurice that she is directly speaking to Shelley:

“They don’t understand that you can really love words – beautiful sounds. And thoughts. Love them awfully, as if they were alive. As if they were people.”
“They are alive. They’re better than people. You know the best of your
Shelley and Plato and Spinoza. Instead of the worst.”
“I should have liked to have known them, too. Sometimes I pretend that I do know them. That they’re alive. That they're here. Saying things and listening. They’re kind. They never misunderstand. They never lose their tempers.”
“You mustn’t do that,” he said sharply.
“Why not?” (Sinclair 1982, 134)

22That the text contrasts the freedom of feminine imagination with Maurice’s rather conservative response stemming from patriarchal behavioural norms is indeed striking. The extract also points at the importance of reading, reception, and intellectual dialogue with poetic works: as an isolated young woman with little access to books, Mary experiences freedom of thought and emotions through her personal reading of Romantic poems; and Maurice’s attempt at controlling her behaviour proves pointless.

23Shelley and Byron are also instrumental in Mary’s rebellion against Victorian social norms. In the following example, in which Mary encounters Shelley’s verse for the first time, poetry helps her understand the intersections of values and textual traditions:

There was something about Shelley in Byron’s Life and Letters. Something she had read and forgotten, that persisted, struggled to make itself remembered. Shelley’s Pantheism.
Table of Contents – Poems written in 1816 – “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” She read that first.
“Sudden thy shadow fell on me: –
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!”
It had happened to Shelley, too. He knew how you felt when it happened. (Only you didn’t shriek.) It was a real thing, then, that did happen to people. She read the “Ode to a Sky-Lark,” the “Ode to the West Wind” and “Adonais.”
All her secret happiness was there. Shelley knew about the queerness of the sharp white light, and the sudden stillness, when the grey of the fields turns to violet: the clear, hard stillness that covers the excited throb-throbbing of the light. […]
“And what are you so deep in?” Mr. Propart said.
“Shelley.”
[…] Next morning the Shelleys were not in their place behind the curtain.
Somebody had moved them to the top shelf. Catty brought the step-ladder.
In the evening they were gone. Mr. Propart must have borrowed them. (Sinclair 1982, 130)

24Just as in the previous quote, the text shows male censorship putting barriers between the female protagonist and the Romantic canon. The Romantic text is inserted into the novel as yet another example of fragmentation that encapsulates both the epiphany and its material repression. But the powers of Romantic texts appear stronger than Mr. Propart’s double attempt at controlling the little girl’s reading. Despite what the onomastic might have suggested, Mr. Propart is an agent of censorship, stressing once again Sinclair’s emphasis on the importance of doubt and critical distance. Luckily, Mary eventually finds her way to more books and even sets out to writes her own poems, which somehow merge with Shelley’s aesthetic and palette:

“The pale pearl-purple evening – ” The words rushed together. She couldn’t tell whether they were her own or somebody else’s.
There was the queer shock of recognition that came with your own real things. It wasn't remembering though it felt like it.
Shelley – “The pale purple even.” Not pearl-purple. Pearl-purple was what you saw. The sky to the east after sunset […]. Take out “pale,” and “pearl-purple evening” was your own.
The poem was coming by bits at a time. She could feel the rest throbbing behind it, an unreleased, impatient energy.
Her mother looked in at the door. “What are you doing it for, Mary?”
“Oh – for nothing.”
“Then for pity’s sake come down into the warm room and do it there. You’ll catch cold.”
She hated the warm room.
The poem would be made up of many poems. It would last a long time, through the winter and on into the spring. As long as it lasted she would be happy. She would be free from the restlessness and the endless idiotic reverie of desire. (Sinclair 1982, 234)

25As the extract stages Modernist experimentation, it also offers paronomasia as an experimentation with language. The parallel with Stephen Daedalus’ purple prose in Joyce’s Portrait also complicates the novel’s palette. Overall, the scene epitomizes the conflicting narratives that run throughout the novel. On the one hand, Mary manages to write her own poetry and to make Shelley’s pale and purple clouds her own. Her poem is “made up of many poems,” her own and others, as if she finally managed to inscribe herself in a literary tradition. And that her long-lasting poetry is described as outliving seasons and enabling her to reach “happiness,” a key term in Sinclair as we have seen, suggests that this is a pivotal moment. The mother’s taunting remark is quickly overtaken not by questions or resignation, but by Mary’s strong refusal as the text continues to describe her writing (and not her defeat) as she continues to explore her mystical and poetic path.

26In addition, the scene’s innovative depiction of feminine desire and energy comes from Jung’s analytical psychology (and his concept of the libido, which is much closer to Bergson’s élan vital than to Freud’s psychosexual theory) as well as from Schopenhauer’s Will (Thrall 2020; Mosimann 2015). The Sinclairian libido draws from C. G. Jung’s desexualised libido but it clearly is a new approach: “the Libido has many of the attributes of God. It is eternal, indestructible, pure in its essence, infinite in its manifestations, of which the sexual impulse is only one” (Sinclair c. 1915, 44). In an unpublished yet influential essay entitled “The Way of Sublimation,” Sinclair delved into psychoanalytical sublimation and suggested that artistic creation (like writing poems) was a means to sublimate one’s libido and reach that happiness, i.e. that moment out of time that she described at great length in her philosophical essays, without running the risk of dissociation.

27An additional vignette extract might help us understand the scope of the Romantic influence on Sinclair’s novel and on Mary’s rebirth as an artist, as Shelley and Byron play a role in Mary’s piano playing, thereby providing her with another means of escape as she finds her own sound patterns and visual imagery. When linked to music, Romantic poetry appears as a new type of coping strategy that eventually develops into her own mode of expression and artistic creation:

Sometimes the wounded, mutilated Allegro would cry inside you all day, imploring you to finish it, to let it pour out its life in joy.
When it left off the white sound patterns of poems came instead. They floated down through the dark as she lay on her back in her hard, narrow bed. Out of doors, her feet, muffled in wet moor grass, went to a beat, a clang.
She would never play well. […] She would make poems. They couldn’t hear you making poems. They couldn’t see your thoughts falling into sound patterns.
Only part of the pattern would appear at once while the rest of it went on sounding from somewhere a long way off. When all the parts came together the poem was made. You felt as if you had made it long ago, and had forgotten it and remembered. (Sinclair 1982, 183)

28The nearly synesthetic dimension (“They couldn’t see your thoughts falling into sound patterns”) is represented as a means of evading family repression. But the last sentence of this excerpt hints at a rebirth through art via memory. Its movement (“made long ago,” “forgotten,” “remembered”) echoes an oft-quoted reading of Shelley’s “The Cloud” as a manifestation of the Romantics’ beliefs in childhood regeneration and foreshadows the concluding chapter. Romantic texts have thus become fully ingrained in Mary’s individuation or Bildung; they provide her with new landmarks that influence her self-representation and self-actualisation as they turn into means of expressions and philosophical doubt. They bring her a sense of artistic filiation that shapes the creation of her Modernist self, while echoing Sinclair’s own aesthetic experimentations, philosophical and psychological investigations. Such filiation is central to the gendering of Modernism as it enables Sinclair to reclaim a sense of artistic tradition for her female protagonist while building an alternative approach to Pound’s “Make it new” (Pound 1934) and ascertaining her own Modernist montage.